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Stock markets may be at multiyear highs, but fund managers are still relatively upbeat on the equity markets and predict more economic progress globally.

That\’s the findings of the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Fund Manager Survey for November, which shows investors have regained confidence in the global economic outlook with the political paralysis in Washington in October out of the way for now. 67% of respondents now expect the world\’s economy to strengthen over the next 12 months, up a remarkable 13 percentage points from last month.

Fund manager\’s fear of the bond market is greater than equity market greed. That\’s according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch\’s fund manager survey for September, which finds that five years on from the financial crisis, investors are happily long assets tied to the U.S. real estate market and macro \”normalization.\”

A panel of fund managers tried to read the tea leaves Wednesday on where the markets were heading, and the views were divergent on what mix of investments were right for the current state of affairs.

But there\’s one thing virtually all of them agreed on — despite a recent rally, the current environment can still be described as a \”zombie stock market\” with a lot more potential. It\’s best to go long, they say, because there\’s hidden value in a number of stocks that has yet to be realized because the markets have been short-sighted of late. There still are many investors unwilling to take the plunge after several years of recession.

\”The market isn\’t very forward looking,\” said John Calamos, one of the fund managers on the panel. \”In these periods, growth is not rewarded very well.\”

Hedge-fund manager Dan Loeb said Wednesday that his Third Point Offshore Fund returned 9.0% in the first quarter of 2013. In his quarterly letter to investors, he said the top five winners for the fund during the quarter were Yahoo, the fund\’s bet on the macro situation in Japan, American International Group, Virgin Media and Herbalife.

The five worst losers in the period were gold, the hedge fund\’s short funds and Greek government bonds.

Japanese stocks have soared over the past few weeks, but fund managers at least remain wary.

The Nikkei Stock Average, Japan’s benchmark blue-chip index, has climbed 5.1% so far this month and 17.4% so far this year, breaking back through the 10,000 level Wednesday for the first time since early April.

After languishing for months, Tokyo stocks took flight in mid-November on expectations that the Bank of Japan will undertake new measures to fight deflation. Such expectations sent the yen falling, boosting the prospects of the nation\’s exporters, along with their share prices.

Perhaps legendary fund manager Bill Miller should have stopped while he was ahead.

In waiting until now to announce that he will be stepping down as manager of the Legg Mason Value Trust, he is leaving at a time when his fund is behind the S&P 500 index for each of the 1-, 3-, 5-, 10- and 15-year periods. In fact, according to Morningstar, it is behind that benchmark over the entire 21 years since 1990 when Miller took over the fund.

If he had instead stepped down at the end of 2005, of course, the news stories announcing it would have highlighted Miller’s unprecedented feat of outperforming the S&P 500 index in each of the previous 15 calendar years.

Six years later, and with a long-term return below that of buying and holding, that 15-year streak looks a lot less worth bragging about.

Indeed, Miller’s record will now go down in history as yet another illustration of how difficult it is to beat the market. At the end of the 2005, at the peak of Miller’s reputation for beating the market every year, skeptical statisticians had pointed out that if you had enough monkeys flipping coins, you’d also expect one of them to flip 15 heads in a row.

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